Lucia's Chapters of Coming Forth by Day Ruth Maleczech at Mabou Mines during the 1st Irish Theater Festival.Credit
Julie Archer

James Joyce is your father and Samuel Beckett is one of your boyfriends. How do you make your own path? You try to become an artist, of course, a dancer (be gone, words!), but instead end up institutionalized for almost 50 years. That’s the story of Lucia Joyce, thwarted artist, crazy person and subject of “Lucia’s Chapters of Coming Forth by Day,” a suggestive but unsatisfying Mabou Mines production written and directed by Sharon Fogarty that is having its New York premiere as part of the 1st Irish Theater Festival.

We meet Lucia (the venerable Ruth Maleczech) at the end, when she’s 75. “Bad news,” she says to start the play, “I’m dead.” Perched in a school-type chair that dominates the stage (and can be lifted or rotated as the character’s thoughts take flight), Lucia has a large volume near her right hand, her “chapters,” or guidebook for the afterlife. Her father wrote one too, she says, “Finnegans Wake.”

The set by Jim Clayburgh (he also did the moody lighting) contains screens for Julie Archer’s shifting projections. A boat floats by with a ferryman of souls. Or the stage becomes St. Andrew’s, the English hospital with high, prisonlike windows where Lucia died. Or the changing images reflect Lucia’s jumbled mind.

If Ms. Fogarty’s play is Lucia’s wake, then Lucia is pretty much the only mourner, sending herself off to the next world with a steady stream of talk, much of it opaque. Joyce (Paul Kandel) also appears, sometimes as a silhouette, sometimes in the flesh and almost always to Lucia’s irritation (overshadowed even among the shadows).

Lucia may be dead, but spectral she’s not. Holding forth from her chair, dancing awkwardly in her pale nightie or singing with Joyce, Ms. Maleczech makes of Lucia an earthy, mercurial creature, who is sometimes lucidly aware and even funny. It’s a committed, if not always enjoyable performance. (At times you may feel as if you’re trapped in the subway being shouted at by a madwoman.)

For Ms. Fogarty, Lucia is all about language. She’s a mash-up artist with a clever tongue — she speaks Italian, English, French and German — and a talent for creating portmanteau words that, the play suggests, influenced Joyce.

But Lucia Joyce isn’t James Joyce. And neither is Ms. Fogarty. So after a while Lucia’s ramblings, no matter how Joycean, seem just that: rambling and earthbound. And so, despite the tight production and Ms. Maleczech’s dedication, “Lucia’s Chapters” is only intermittently engaging. You may start to think, as Lucia does: “Oh, death is tiresome. When will it end?”